Yahoo! Pipes: An Introduction

It's been a good long while since I've published an article over at Community MX, but I'm happy to say that I'm getting back into the swing of things and have started a new series today about Yahoo! Pipes.

You may have missed the announcement about Pipes when the service went live back in February but it really is a milestone in the ability to consume customized RSS feeds and XML data. The significant part about Pipes is that you don't need to be a programmer to get to this data and twist (or mash to use the popular term) the information into something you or your audience will find useful. For basic things like creating your own blog aggregator it's as simple as dragging a few modules into the design environment and pasting in the feed URL. Of course there's much, much more that can be done, as this series will demonstrate.

For now, start out with this article, Yahoo! Pipes: An Introduction. Still to come will be articles on creating your own customized RSS feed of your favorite blogs, how to build a persistent search feed that scours the web for the news you're after, and options for consuming the feeds that your Pipe outputs.

When Data-Driven Decisions Depend on Bad Data You Get...

...bad decisions.

That wasn't such a huge leap of logic now was it? And yet, here in Florida we still find room for debate, toss millions and millions of dollars at unproven pet projects dreamed up by bands of runaway education bureaucrats, make ill-advised curriculum decisions, and chain our education system to the results of a few tests administered once a year. That's the bad news.

The good news is that politicians in our fair state are finally waking up to the voice of public opinion that says taxpayers don't want public schools to fail, and that they don't want to toss out PE, the arts, music, civics, and the many other things that make educating a child more than the sum of an annual performance evaluation. Finally, it appears that the dark cloud of hatred for public schools that was the watch word of the ultra-conservatives, under the committed leadership of former governor Jeb Bush, has been uncovered for what it was. A direct assault on public education itself. As former Chancellor of schools in Florida has stated:

"What I saw was that 90 percent of the energy went to undermining our public schools with vouchers and charter schools....There was an arrogance, a hubris, a lack of coordination on every major issue."

The attitudes have changed not because of any major political revelation, but rather because no one can safely vouch for the complete reliability of the tests themselves. This year's FCAT results revealved just how wrong things can go, when it was discovered that there was a precipitous drop in reading scores for 3rd grade students. At first the fine folks at our education department wanted us to believe that last year's crop of 3rd graders were particularly bright, until the test scores from the same kids--testing as 4th graders this year--revealed that they were not in fact a class of thousands of reading savants, but were just plain old run of the mill kids like all the others. It was last year's test that was the problem. It was too easy.

And that has led to more jiggering of data and tweaking of expectations and press releases from the state

Posted by: Kim on Jun 24, 07 | 1:28 pm | Profile

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Peeves

Prevaricators
Dissemblers
Liars
Deceivers
Back-stabbers
Sneaks

Obstructionists
Stonewallers
Sandbaggers
Hypocrites

Phonies

Know-it-alls
Blowhards
Braggarts

Whiners
Snivelers
Bellyachers

Bean-counters
Paper-pushers

Bureaucrats

Wow! Where Did Those Months of My Life Get Off To?

Well, when I said there would be light blogging ahead way back in September of last year I don't think I had a full appreciation of just how much of my life would be consumed by the home remodeling project that we have undertaken. But here it is June, the house isn't finished, we're still living out of boxes in an apartment, and well, I'm kinda over the whole thing. But, good soldiers that we are, we're muddling along hoping to get back into the house sometime in the next, uh, 6 weeks or so.

But hey! Let's look on the bright side. We're going to have a way cool house with lots of interesting custom architectural details that I've lovingly sweated over when this is all over. For the record, the front of the house, which used to look like this:



Became this during the demolition and addition phase:



And now looks like this:



Pretty sizable change just right there. Not to mention the complete gutting of about 2/3's of the existing home, the new roof, new windows, and on and on. And all it's cost is a broken thumb (always watch the kick back on your power miter saw children), lots and lots of time on the phone chasing contractors, suppliers, utility companies, and may God Bless Them, the fine, fine, FINE professionals at our city building department, and quite a few dollars.

And the fun's not over yet! With any luck we'll be getting our final mechanical inspections on the interior of the house this week (and may God Bless the fine, fine, FINE professionals at our city building department), get insulated and inspected some more next week, then finally be able to hang drywall and get the house looking like a house on the interior. Whoo weee! Then it's just a matter of all the interior woodwork, the cabinets, paint, tile, and the other minor details that will have the house in move-in condition sometime in.......uh, August?

So, while there's still lots and lots (and lots) or work to be done, maybe the hardest part is behind us. We're really excited, but worn out and worn down. But we're pressing on.

And for the first time in about 4 months I'm starting to actually want to write again.

Oh yeah, the full photo set (at least the pics I've gotten around to uploading) can be at this Flickr photo set.